Meiji Painting

The Meiji period (1868–1912) is a watershed moment in Japan’s long history, marking a shift from indigenous governance organized around a shogun and regional lords (daimyō) to constitutional monarchy. In the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan had limited international relations as leadership sought to maintain tight domestic control. This famous “isolation policy” (sakoku) was porous, however; Japan traded with its Asian neighbors and with Holland, through which it gained European goods and insight into foreign affairs. The arrival of an American naval squadron led by Matthew Perry (1853) marked the beginning of Japan’s reintegration into wide international relations. External threats to Japan’s sovereignty and internal pressures shattered its feudal government, and rebellion replaced feudal lords with an oligarchy of advisors to the emperor (Meiji) and ultimately a parliament. Meiji is the period of Japan’s Westernization, when it sought to catch up with the West technologically and gain equal treatment through social and political reforms. In the arts, Westernization brought new forms of architecture and decoration, sculpture, and oil painting. The central problem of the period was the degree to which Japan should Westernize while still remaining Japanese. Japanese painting experienced the problem as a basic divide: tradition-based painting (nihonga) versus Western oil-based painting (yōga). Critical reception of Meiji art was both domestic and international, as this was the heyday of international expositions, and art was seen as an index to the quality of national culture. Critics and artists within Japan engaged in dynamic processes of exploration and assimilation; Western critics, alarmed by industrialization, saw assimilation as destructive of “traditional” culture. Western critics and collectors valued art in two qualitative levels: fine and applied. Where applied arts, such as vases, integrated easily into interiors and posed no challenges to Western hierarchies, Japanese painting was alien and used materials more akin to drawing than oils. Scholarship on Meiji painting progressed along two opposing tracks: Western scholars stopped at the onset of Westernization—Japanese art was no longer “purely” Japanese after that point, which Japanese officials understood when constructing displays of art that ended with Edo at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Domestically, Japanese scholars organically studied succeeding periods, styles, and artists. Scholarship on Meiji painting in Western languages is limited, its growth coming only in the last couple of decades. Only in the 1990s did Western students begin to focus their careers on Meiji painting and beyond.